SAP Launches New Sustainability Solutions in the Cloud to Help Ensure Product Safety

November 5, 2012 by SAP News

WALLDORF — To build a foundation for sustainable growth, manufacturers must simultaneously ensure products are safe and compliant with complex, varied environmental regulations. Bringing together its cloud leadership and footprint with manufacturers worldwide, today SAP announced two new cloud-based sustainability solutions to help customers more easily handle these challenges. First, SAP Product Stewardship Network allows manufacturers to collaborate with suppliers and collect detailed information about the substances that make up their products. Second, SAP introduced SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand, a content service to manage the often painstaking and expensive process of creating regulatory documentation.

“Connecting to our ecosystem in the cloud will reduce costs and increase productivity for our employees and supply chain partners,” said Torger Trenner, environmental manager, The Weidmüller Group. “We create more than 40,000 distinct products and components for industrial connectivity and have a business presence in over 80 countries. We constantly get requests from customers for detailed product information. Our business relationships depend on getting the answer quickly and correctly. That’s why we decided to help SAP’s development of the product stewardship network. It will enable everyone in the supply chain to enter and maintain their own information. This will help us — and all participating companies worldwide — amass and provide the information needed much faster and more efficiently.”

To comply with constantly evolving environmental regulations like Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical substances (REACH) and Restrictions of Hazardous Substances (ROHS), companies need to know exactly what chemical substances are in the raw materials, components and products that they purchase from suppliers. They must also declare those substances and tell people how to handle them safely. SAP Product Stewardship Network and SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand help solve these problems. Both products leverage the power and flexibility of a hybrid cloud and on-premise model to collaborate, collect, analyze and disseminate product information from disparate sources.

SAP Product Stewardship Network: Manufacturers and Suppliers Collaborate in the CloudAimed at discrete manufacturers, such as producers of electronic or medical equipment, SAP Product Stewardship Network allows customers to quickly work with suppliers in the cloud to make sure that banned substances are excluded from their products.

For example, a high-tech company that wants to bring new products to market must ensure environmental compliance by assessing each component against a constantly growing list of regulated substances so they can be properly disclosed. This currently requires thousands of emails across the supply chain; it is still a manual, time-consuming process. Delays can result in loss of revenue and risk proper compliance.

SAP Product Steward Network allows suppliers and manufacturers to collaborate immediately. They can quickly work together to make the appropriate disclosures, find the right substitutes or adapt product designs quickly based on available, compliant materials. By connecting suppliers in a cloud-based network, companies can easily exchange compliance and material data. New product information can be uploaded once and updated across the cloud so all participants in the network can immediately view and act on it. The offering also works with SAP Business Suite software and takes advantage of all on-premise data it contains.

New On-Demand Content Service for Product Safety DocumentsProcess industries such as chemical or pharmaceutical manufacturers must continuously develop and update safety data sheets and labels to stay in compliance. Each of these documents can take from days to weeks to develop, and a midsize chemical manufacturer can spend up to 3 million dollars yearly on this time-consuming business process. With SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand, manufacturers no longer have to author their own safety data sheets.

By networking with the customer’s on-premise EHS solution, the content service from SAP takes the customers’ product data, generates country-specific data sheets and labels in the cloud and then delivers the documents back to the customer. Keeping current with changes in global regulations, SAP estimates that the content service can decrease ongoing safety data sheet costs by up to 50 percent and free up precious resources to focus on more strategic projects.

“SAP uniquely can offer customers a powerful hybrid model that helps drive down costs of compliance while freeing up resources to focus on what matters most — strategic innovation,” said Peter Maier, senior vice president, Energy and Natural Resources Solutions, SAP. “Our product safety solutions already touch 5 trillion dollars of all the world’s manufactured goods. With so many customers across the supply chain already using SAP — and the strength of our combined cloud and on-premise strategy — we are playing a central role in creating a global business network that lets companies collaborate to run better and protect the triple bottom line.”

Next Major Event: SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd MadridIn 2012, SAP again brings together its largest ecosystem education event series with its premier customer conference for a co-located event to be held in Madrid, Spain, from November 13-16. With SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners, and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe, and can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. SAP TechEd brings IT managers, software developers, administrators, and business process experts together to learn in an interactive environment directly from the experts responsible for cutting-edge SAP technology. The co-located event provides access to the entire SAP ecosystem and enables attendees to learn how SAP can help their organizations run like never before. Follow on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and @SAPTechEd, and join the conversation at #SAPPHIRENOW and #SAPTechEd.